merlinme

Not sure if you can.

"the AI can get attack/defense that you cannot possibly have by that time period even with amazing land": sure, but all you need to do to beat those values is have a strong mage hero and/ or magic damage dealing troops (e.g. with magic staffs). Cast mass curse, or one of the better damage dealing spells, or do tactical summons, or wellspring. Heck, with a high enough spell mastery value, against non mounted troops Titans Breath makes the AI troops more or less helpless, for less than 20 mana

That's really great news. I've put suggestions at other points in the forum, but to summarise them all in one place: 1) Please have standard skill upgrade paths for AI heroes to use so that it builds its heroes more effectively. E.g. death magic summoner, bow using assassin, club using warrior, etc. etc. 2) If the AI is not always building in all its cities (as is apparently the case from the Fog Of War thread) it certainly should be! It should also be using all its Es

Incidentally, are you using a custom sovereign? If you're finding it too easy with a custom sovereign... don't use a custom sovereign. If you're finding it too easy with Tame... pick a sovereign without Tame. I'm not saing that the game gets that much more difficult at that point, but you may conceivably find a point for building troops! I experimented once with a custom sovereign, but since then I've used the standard ones, and I haven't chose

From your description, especially "the build indicator for the structure does not go towards the right", I would guess that you haven't actually built the warg den yet. It will have been added to the build queue of the nearest city. Click on that city and see what's currently being built. Your warg den is probably queued up behind something else. You won't start producing wargs until it's actually been completed.

Yeah, there definitely comes a point where I've pretty obviously won and it's just a question of how I want to finish. It's to the game's credit that I still have fun. The monsters and quests are a lot more challenging than the AI, so generally I entertain myself getting a dragon, or maybe taking on the quest victory. As I've said on half a dozen occasions, the AI needs work. It's too easy to roll over AIs after the early game. Two or three battles and it&

One of the nice things about the game is that clearly there are a lot of different strategies which can be successful. A lot of people recommend archers, but in half a dozen games I don't think I've ever built them. I've never considered the amount of research required worth it. I did build a lot of warg mages in one game, they were pretty effective. But generally I have an army of my sovereign as a super powerful mage (either summoning, support, or damage, depending on which

On the specific issue of taxation, I personally worry about getting too far behind the AI in research, and gold doesn't seem that important at the start, at least until you can rush things. So in other words I leave it on as low a setting as I can for as long as I can. I'll leave it on no taxation if feasible. I haven't really experimented much with the higher settings, there probably are better ways to mini-max it. A default setting of Low has worked fine for me so far.

Interesting! All you can really say to that if correct it looks like there are some quick wins to be made on the AI. Like, consider all empty Essence slots, and if there's nothing better to do add a zero cost one like Meditation; always be building something; don't waste movement points; and check at the end of each turn whether a settler unit has reached its goal and can build, in which case it should build. In an ideal world it would also use Essence slo

In general, the way you win games like this is by doing things faster than the other players. You can search these forums for (at least) two exploits which would probably win you a game fairly easily, but it's not really necessary. 1) You need an ok start. Either a) one good city with resources all around you, which you make into a fortress, build up a super stack, start a war with your nearest AI, let them kill all their troops on your city's defences, and then take their cit

Really interesting comments from sweatyboatman. The point that the AI doesn't re-evaluate targets as it sees something new makes a lot of sense based on the behaviour I've seen. So for example, the AI very effectively sent its stack to attack my capital, but ignored my outpost along the way, when it could easily have taken it with an (at most) one turn delay on its primary target. Even if it didn't bother garrisoning them, that's still a turn where I lose t

I don't understand why the AI leaves goodies lying around. A human player wouldn't, and neither should the AI. It doesn't necessarily need to attack every lair; most obviously it might not have a powerful enough army, but also not clearing all lairs is a valid strategy if you want to use the generated monsters to level your heroes. But it really should pick up undefended loot. Other issues with the strategic AI for me: 5) It doesn't build stacks correctly from

Only allowing cull the weak to cull non-summoned units makes a lot of sense to me and seems like an easy win. I don't really have an opinion on consume as I've never tried this strategy. Conceivably it could be made to scale with game difficulty, e.g. reduce the mana gained by 25% per level above Challenging. We could call it the "stop Chaosti rule." [e digicons]:grin:[/e] If it's felt appropriate to go for an across the board change, I would personally star

A hero in a town does give you an unrest reduction and a bit of extra garrison if needed. They can also lead your garrison out to attack any monsters or enemy troops which are wandering nearby. That is just about the only way they can gain significant experience. Even with the adventurer's guild, 1xp a turn is not going to get you very far, I personally think this is a bit broken at the moment. I would have thought they could at least make it +1 xp/ turn for administrator typ

A lot of good ideas here, especially on the user interface. I definitely agree you should be told what the consequences are if you agree to a treaty the AI has offered. In my case when I agreed to pay tribute I had no idea it would mean an enforced peace for 30 turns. I also agree there should be an option to highlgiht units which will have movement points left after their planned move, (the turn marker should not highlight), as you frequently want them to do something else. <p

Aedorn, most of your comments are about how you play the game. The number of responses which highlight other ways to play the game, some disagreeing with your views, suggest that the game is deeper than you have perhaps suggested. And I do find it kind of funny how everyone says how broken a game is which they appear to have spent 100 hours+ playing (especially if you include Fallen Enchantress). The things which you've mentioned which I think are genuinely issues: 2) Your

A properly levelled mage can easily win you the game. I've just beaten one of the wildland bosses using "Kill" on a Ridiculous game. With maximum spell power, reduced casting time, high initiative, the bad guys had one turn each before I could cast with a 96% chance of success. It cost me 195 mana and I only had enough mana for one try, but 96% seems like pretty good odds (and in any case I had an escape scroll). My army was barely scratched; with t

A tooltip sounds a really good idea. It would also be nice if the exact effects of saying yes to something were made clear, e.g. the 30 turns of peace from paying tribute, which I didn't realise. If this information was available somewhere it wasn't obvious to me. I did however manage to get the AI I had paid tribute to to decleare war on me by trespassing on its territoy and refusing to leave.

If the AI hasn't got much of it I see it valued at 6 per metal. If it's got hundreds of the stuff it values it at zero.

Hi, hope you're enjoying the game. In answer to your questions: 1) Not sure if you can put them out, I've only had that event happen to me once and I didn't try 2) When your villages grow into cities you choose whether to make them fortresses (good for training troops), conclaves (good for magic and research) and towns (good for food and gold). A lot of buildings can only be built in one or the other. So from memory you can only build Temple of Essence in Conclave.

I agree that it's not hard to create a custom faction that is very overpowered. I'm not sure this really counts as a balance problem. If you think a certain combination of traits is game-breakingly overpowered... don't use it. If your intention is to say "I beat the game on Insane" then you may attempt all sorts of exploits, but again, it's not compulsory to play the game that way.

Interesting couple of posts. I'm not convinced of the viability of a one city strategy on higher levels, but respect to Nick-Danger if you've made it work. I don't see how you can get sufficient research and gold from one fortress to get a decent army, but maybe if you have access to resources which compensate. I agree though that the crucial thing is how long before you meet the AI. If you meet an AI early who is more powerful than you and th

To clarify my last point: later versions of buildings usually give you the similar bonus to a city stat as earlier versions, but take twice as long to build. So I generally think it's worth building all the quick buildings first (giving you a bonus to research and gold and unrest and mana and food) than to spend twice as long getting one of them fully upgraded.

Pretty much all the weapons can be made to work, which is one of the nice things about the game. Early troops often don't survive a battle, so being able to use the special ability at the start of a battle to do double damage is a good thing. Counterattack is obviously handy but the initial enemy attack may kill one or two of your unit, dramatically reducing the amount of damage you do. It's hard to overstate the importance of initiative, so my main reason for using spear troops

Regarding build order, I tend to prioritise Production increasing and Unrest reducing buildings, as they make building other stuff faster. I don't bother with food increasing buildings unless I'm actually approaching a population cap. Even if you are approaching a population cap, building a pioneer will use population and also mean the growth isn't wasted, which may be worth considering if you need pioneers anyway. Zone increasing buildings (monument, town hall)